Solar System

[Coolwater]

I stopped at the library today. The kids program made a big 3D solar system to hang in the lobby. It's not terribly accurate, but imaginative and colorful, with swaths of sparkly net for the Milky Way. I was looking up into it and thinking that it needed a space ship, when I discovered at one end, the Tardis sailing into the system. It was near the AC vent, so it was spinning.

[Cyrus The Great]

Sounds very cute. Could we see a picture please?

[dubiousbystander]

Oooh! Does the library have pictures on their website? That seems likely! What a nice display!

[Coolwater]

No pictures, sorry. It wasn't up very long. There are Whovians among the librarians, though. They did an awesome 50th anniversary party that you entered through a Tardis Police Box mock up. It was situated in front of a large closet that had been emptied for the occasion, so (all together now!) it was bigger on the inside!

[Cyrus The Great]

Related to the original topic, I watched a documentary a few days ago about the evolution of live on Earth and the contribution that our Moon made that helped complex/multi-cellular life to arise. The Moon's presence in fairly close orbit around us and its large size relative to the size of Earth both help to hold the position of the Earth's axis of rotation stable. The tilt of the Earth's axis does slowly change by a few degrees back and forth over tens of thousands of years, but this small change doesn't greatly alter the climate of our planet. However, if our Moon had never existed, the changes to the Earth's axial tilt over time would have been very extreme and perhaps the Earth would only be home to microbes today. So, yea for our Moon!

[Andrew NDB]

Related to the original topic, I watched a documentary a few days ago about the evolution of live on Earth and the contribution that our Moon made that helped complex/multi-cellular life to arise. The Moon's presence in fairly close orbit around us and its large size relative to the size of Earth both help to hold the position of the Earth's axis of rotation stable. The tilt of the Earth's axis does slowly change by a few degrees back and forth over tens of thousands of years, but this small change doesn't greatly alter the climate of our planet. However, if our Moon had never existed, the changes to the Earth's axial tilt over time would have been very extreme and perhaps the Earth would only be home to microbes today. So, yea for our Moon!

Lessens the chances of those worlds like ours being habitable like ours... unless they have a moon like ours.

[Cyrus The Great]

Lessens the chances of those worlds like ours being habitable like ours... unless they have a moon like ours.

If Gene Roddenberry had known this back in the day, I wonder if he would have written Star Trek differently? I still think there is other intelligent live out there, but maybe it is a lot less common than some folks would like to believe.

[n107]

If Gene Roddenberry had known this back in the day, I wonder if he would have written Star Trek differently? I still think there is other intelligent live out there, but maybe it is a lot less common than some folks would like to believe.

I think that just using earth alone as an example would suggest that intelligent life is, indeed, quite uncommon.

[Cyrus The Great]

You have a good point there!